Facebook’s BrowserLab – Automated Regression Detection for the Web

“Facebook’s BrowserLab – Automated Regression Detection for The Web” is the new thing you haven’t heard of yet. But, it’s gonna revolutionize the fate of Facebook Loading Time soon or far soon. Because it’s a whole new concept that can make several small, but significant changes in Facebook Loading. You can check out the whole BrowserLab concept by Facebook@Scale-2016 Talks – San Jose.

Facebook-BrowserLab

After many years, Facebook realised that Client-side rendering is popularly gaining which presents many new challenges for measuring and optimising the End-to-End performance on the web. So, it initiated the concept of “BrowserLab“.

Facebook-BrowserLab-Talk-at-Scale-2016

But back in 2011, Facebook was largely rendered server-side then. Because there was the only negligible amount of JavaScript in it. Today, Facebook Team using simple tools that are focused on server performance to understand loading time. And the problems that occur at facebook are also very different when compared to 2011.

So, Facebook has implemented the changes to powerful client-side rendering frameworks like React. Browser Rendering and Scripting Time became a major choke-point issue in Facebook Loading.

And now in the early months of 2016, Facebook found that the majority of load time was spent on the client. From then, Facebook determined to build a system that is capable of detecting changes in performance. It shall be able to run on any mistake to automatically prevent client regressions in various fields.

Client-vs-Server-Facebook-2016

And Facebook named it as “BrowserLab“. It is the concept of automatical analysis of the performance of every code change made by engineers at Facebook. Even small regressions add up quickly when working at Facebook’s Scale, where there are thousands of mistakes and changes each and every day.

As per the official information from Code.Facebook.Com, this thing can catch even the smallest regressions that entire engineers team write. Most probably about 20 ms in page load. It ensures that the site continues to load quickly without client side fixtures.

Facebook’s Software Engineers Jeffrey Dunn, Joel Beales, it has caught a lot of regressions each week and helped our engineers to identify optimisations to remove over 350 ms from every page load on an average estimation.

BrowserLab’s Impact

By using different Tools and Applications, Facebook Engineers Team is redesigning it time to time.